what's your definition of not much?
United made 4.5 billion in profit (after costs) in 2015-2016.
that doesn't seem like a struggling business to me.
Indeed, I saw a documentary once about a German soldier who was beaten up and chucked off a Zeppelin by an American archeologist because he couldn't find his ticket! He survived though after landing on a pile of cases. When he tracked the archeologist down to talk about compensation he got beaten up again by him and his father then strapped to a tank which was run off a cliff!
I think the moral of the documentary was that airlines are worse than Nazis.
I didn't say they're struggling, I said they don't make much money. Their profit margins are quite low. From The Economist link:
I don't know if United's 2015 turns out to be an outlier and is a few percent instead of just one or two percent, but the idea that they've got tons of cash floating around and should just make less is not really plausible.Despite incredible growth, airlines have not come close to returning the cost of capital, with profit margins of less than 1% on average over that period. In 2012 they made profits of only $4 for every passenger carried.
We don't know if one of his patients "would have died". He could be a dentist. He could be a vet. He could be a psychologist. There are all kinds of doctors there exist that have patients. That still doesn't give him the right to disobey a direct lawful order from a police officer.
$4.5 billion isn't "much money" to you? that sounds like a great year to me.
don't get so hung up on margins. business models vary depending on industry. for example, accountants have ~%20 profit margins on average while petroleum wholesalers average ~0.2%.
$4/passenger in profit is pretty good when you are talking about hundreds of millions of people.
Last edited by leetbean; 2017-04-11 at 01:17 PM.
They weren't able to fix the problem because they appear to have deep pockets and short arms. If $800 worth of vouchers (and let's be honest for many they will, for many different reasons, be worthless) is not enough to persuade passengers to give up their seat then they need to offer more.
A bad situation that is handled well is one of the best forms of advertising and methods of gaining customer loyalty as a result businesses, all over the globe, go above and beyond their legal obligations to meet their customers' expectations and minimise the disruption they cause when they get things wrong.
United caused the problem and handled it badly therefore I am 100% sure that this will (and already has) cost them more than they are legally obliged to offer.
Really?? So you don't actually realise that you do this? Interesting.
So you are saying they did this because of his race? How pathetic. He and three others were randomly chosen. The other three didn't resist. He chose to resist. Not only did he resist once, he resisted twice. This has nothing to do with race.
It wasn't a security officer, it was the police.
For a very large business? No, that's not really anything so striking that it should highlight any sort of "wow, they're really raking it in" response. It does seem like they had a better year than usual though.
The point of mentioning the per passenger number is to say that there isn't the sort of wiggle room that people seem to believe there is. Airlines make money on volume, not by wildly overcharging passengers. People that are convinced that United can just switch to a no-overbooking model and just cut CEO pay and it'll be perfect are being really silly.
They were not beating him. He started screaming right when they grabbed him, they had done nothing at that point but grab him to move him out of his seat. Its pretty clear that he hit his lip on the rail of the seat across the aisle. He wasnt unconscious, he was acting like a little child. Like I said, I bet it comes back that this guy has some kind of mental disorder.
In fact, the odds of a patient dying because a single doctor failed to make a flight are staggeringly low. Most docs are not Dr. House, most surgeries can be rescheduled, most checkups aren't actually the end of world, and most hospitals can backfill staff if an emergency comes up.
So, yeah, the "I'm a doctor!" seems a lot more like a "do you know who I am???" than like there's a genuine emergency. The chances that this individual had unique expertise and was flying somewhere that he was the only person that could safe a life would make a good movie, but isn't super common.